


Ethical Calculus

by kollapsar



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mass Murder, Morally Ambiguous Character, PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, also maxson is a prick, and nick is sassy, incredibly ineffective coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 20:01:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7771222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kollapsar/pseuds/kollapsar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A week and a half after the events of Blind Betrayal, Knight Fortune is called up to the Prydwen for new orders. [Covers the events of Tactical Thinking]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ethical Calculus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ariaofthewinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariaofthewinds/gifts).



> Okay, I'm hoping that since you're here, you've read the tags and you know exactly what the fuck you're about to get into. Godspeed, buddy.  
> PS: If you're that kind of sinner, I'm going to let you know right now that unfortunately this fic isn't tagged Mature for sexual content but for very graphic violence and substance abuse. I'm so sorry.

He spent the hour of 0800 holding Danse in a vice grip through a moment when he was almost sure he was going to leave him. And not in the Commonwealth escapee way, no, in the worst way, with a gun thrown out of his hands and laying only a foot away as he held him with all his might until he broke.

He started his day before the sun even rose and took the guns away and laid with those several pieces of the man he used to know, until it was better, until Danse would speak and eat with him.

He spent a second telling Danse to hide when the vertibirds came.

 

It’s 2100 and Alex is so, so tired. The cigarettes have only gotten him so far, soaking the damp fur lining of his jacket in a faded yellow blanket of stink that clouds around him as he steps off the Vertibird.

It’s a shit, foggy night. He can confirm that much of reality, if only for the groans of knights talking of how the condensation clusters on their visors. A grim, consuming shroud of white blankets the Prydwen and makes the airport he flew up from all but invisible.

It’s only been a week, but boarding the Prydwen is always surreal now with the knowledge that he leaves Danse behind on the ground.

Paladin Danse, he reminds himself. Who is by all rights dead at his hand. Paladin Danse whose dogtags sit heavy in his pants pocket for anybody who’d like to ask and see.

“Elder.” It sounds hollow, like he’s not saying it even as he steps over the threshold and hears the knight that escorted him clod away.

“Knight Fortune.” Alexander can count on a single hand how many times Arthur Maxson has called him exclusively to the command deck. The man is staring him down like he could single-handedly make or break the Brotherhood; between the cigar in his hands and the oppressive curl of fog gripping even the command deck, the whole thing is so dismal Alex can’t even summon up the levity to go beyond a slack parade rest that Maxson meets with an annoyed flick of his cigar.

He’s still staring.

Alex remembers that there’s a blazing black love bite where his shoulder meets his neck. Well, he hasn’t seen it but the mighty yelping tenderness that it runs when his collar rubs against his skin and Danse’s face this morning was a good enough indicator. It’s probably raring to compete with Maxson’s ego for size.

What a thought.

An awkward PA announcement gets on and Maxson clears his throat. “At ease, Knight.” He ashes his cigar again and gestures for Alexander to sit, clearly all too content to ignore the blaring absence in the room where Paladin Danse used to be, beside his Knight.

He hesitates, considering maybe not sitting for a moment, but decides to play along to Maxson’s cordial efforts for the time being. The Elder’s wounds are probably still wide open themselves after the recent events- the ones to his pride and authority, of course. Alexander understands but isn’t sympathetic. He has had to hold the real damage in his own arms in Sanctuary, make sense of the shattered pieces and kiss them anyway as Danse drifts between insensible and so present he could hurt himself, seems to want to sometimes.

“You’ve made some incredible progress in the Commonwealth with us in the past months, Fortune. It’s rare to see brothers or sisters rise so quickly in the ranks. We take notice of these things,” Maxson says, softly in that ‘I’m setting you up to watch where you fall’ sort of buttery tone Alexander knows from too many higher-ups in the past. “Drink with me.” He’s already pouring two; bourbon. He can’t say he cares for the taste. He knows Maxson notices. Watches him set that metal cup aside and go for the vodka instead.

Alexander can’t say he’s flattered, but he takes the drink as it’s offered and lets the liquid burn an acrid flavor across his tongue as Maxson sits a seat over where the chairs end and the tables are stocked ready with the liquors. “Permission to speak freely?” Alexander hears himself say.

Maxson swirls his drink a bit. “Permission granted.”

“What are you buttering me up for now?” He still doesn’t feel quite  _ right  _ from the last trip to the Glowing Sea that had him setting up Liberty Prime’s nukes; a Radaway on occasion helped in steps only, but only then supplemented with cut pill of a Buffout or a shot of Med-X to keep his body from succumbing to that standard radiated weakness, keep him alert. But of course it’s time to go. He needs to accept this. This is why he keeps the machine running. For missions. For the Agenda with a capital A.

“Danse’s execution created a missing link in the chain of command,” Maxson remarks. “I’m promoting you to Paladin. All his possessions, including his quarters and his personal suit if Power Armor, are yours. Besides this, we aren’t to speak of that... traitor again.” He pauses. “Congratulations, Paladin.”

Execution. Right. He’s dead to him. Alexander shuts his eyes and finishes his drink with alacrity. This doesn’t feel anything like the first time he was promoted; he can’t imagine what Danse will think of this. “Thank you, Elder.” He feels like Maxson is still in the buttering-up stage to whatever he’s getting to, but he can play the waiting game.

“Paladins hold an esteemed position in our ranks,” Maxson drags on, clearly unaware that Alexander is just waiting for the point. “I don’t give this position with any laxity of judgment, but you are liked among our brothers and sisters. I trust you won’t betray that respect.”

He watches the accumulated remaining drops of the vodka pool in the corner edge of the cup. “Sure.” Danse would have come up with words, words and more words to make this promotion sound- perhaps even feel- like the honor that it’s supposed to be.

Maxson marches on, either oblivious or unyielding. “That being said, you had new orders from Kells. He was going to give them to you himself, but I decided to relieve him of it on the occasion.”

That’s new. Alexander looks up from the cup and gives Maxson his attention. “Yeah?”

“Earlier this month, when I was discussing the destruction of the Institute using Liberty Prime’s warheads, you raised an... unsettling proposal.”

Oh. He’s not sure if he likes where this is going, but Maxson is watching him attentively for some kind of interaction. “The evacuation, right,” he says, frowning and playing the cup along his fingers. The evacuation came to him a moment of blinding sobriety, the light of day worming into his head like a rusty nail and Danse looking over at him from the next bivvy with concern. He shudders an inhaling breath. “I saw them down there, you know. Little schoolrooms. It doesn’t make sense to not put this in place-”

“You see it as saving a few lives, the Brotherhood sees it as a gesture of weakness and time spent where others, less desirable, could escape. How can I guarantee to my men that they’re not already indoctrinated to the vicious mindset of this Institute? Letting parts of this organization live would be a blow to Brotherhood morale. It would cease to be the absolute victory my men desire.”

Alexander blinks, stilling the rotations of the cup until it settles cold in his palms. “Maxson. They’re children, civilians, innocents. You can’t be serious.”

Maxson raises an eyebrow at him and takes a drink, as if to say,  _ When am I not?  _ “Paladin, consider. By entirely rough guess, put ten percent of the Institute’s population as children. In rough figures, half of the children are already indoctrinated to Institute mindset. You’re asking me to dispirit my men and risk allowing volatile and dangerous synths run free on account of the five percent.”

He sees white for a second- a flicker, a moment, and then it’s over and he’s still there staring Maxson down and probably gaping because it’s  _ incredible,  _ simply incredible how his views on this man have shifted in such a short amount of time.

“Sorry,” he breathes. “I’m going to refuse to consider these bullshit statistics.” The words lay themselves out satisfactorily. There’s a warm stir in his belly and the beginnings of sensation; he needs another drink but Maxson has the bottle and he’s better than that right now. “Are you getting somewhere with this or can I have my orders... sir?”

“Kells and I constructed your evacuation plan in accordance to the maps you provided us of the Institute.”

He shifts. “Sorry?”

Maxson leans over and takes the cup from him without asking, seemingly irritated by how he’d started turning it over in his fingers again. “The plan is made. There’s just one more element needed to bring it to fruition.” Alex watches with blurred vision as he pours glistening drink into it again. “My men must be assured that we’ve won if we remove every scourge of the Commonwealth at once, if those synths that do come aground have nowhere to go but back to hell.” He hands Alexander the cup; Alexander begrudges himself his clutching hands that receive the cool metal to his skin. “I’m talking about the Railroad, of course.”

“The Railroad.” His mind instantly drifts to Old North Church; the tunnel, the dust that choked his lungs, the dim generator lighting and the stares of its leaders beneath it. He’s only been there once, to decode the Courser chip. They knew who he was, but they were good to him.

He knows their names. “You want me to kill them.”

“Eliminate them, Paladin, yes,” Maxson says, sitting back in the bench with lackadaisical ease. “With a full cavalry of Brotherhood Knights behind you to come back to the Prydwen with a story of victory.”

This is Arthur Maxson, the Elder, with a bait and switch all along and a bottle to ease him along the entire length of it. This is a proposal for mass murder; this is dirty work he just wants done. Alexander wants the world to go so very quiet but he can only cover it up with the sting on his tongue as he drags the vodka down his throat and finished the drink at once.

Fuck.

“All right,” he hears himself say as the buzz envelops warmly in his head.  _ So fast? _ A voice niggles in the back of his head and it sounds dangerously like Nora. _ Lives against lives? Innocents against operatives? Arithmetic?  _ “I’ll do it.”

“Those were orders, not an offer, Fortune.”

“Sure. Yes.” He exhales. “When?”

Maxson’s form is vivid in the halogen lights and drifts in his vision in an aimless back and forth. He’s folded his arms and is still now looking gravely to the fog beyond. “Late tomorrow night. You are to report in at 2200 to the airport.”

“Okay.” He lurches to set the cup on the ground rather than hand it back, and pushes up off the bench.

“You’re not dismissed, Paladin,” Maxson says, softly, warningly.

“No.” He turns, folding and unfolding his hands as he darkly regards this young man. “I’m not. I apologize... sir.”

There’s a consuming silence where it seems like the Elder is seriously contemplating saying something seriously changing between both of them. There’s the suggestion of it being about Danse- at least, Alexander wants it to be. But he just says, “I want you to wear your power armor tomorrow. I know you’re not in the habit- and given your talents, I’m usually willing to concede- but the Brotherhood cannot afford to lose you now.”

Alex nods. Dimly, he wonders how much calibration it’ll need; where his body won’t fit where Danse’s did, where there’ll be hollow where Danse’s body filled out. If it smells like him or if they purged it upon retrieval. “Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

“Sir.” He can’t walk any faster.

 

It’s 2245. It seems implicit that he retreat to his new quarters, that he opt not to chase the buzz and tuck in for the night. To sleep in sheets that still smell like the soap Danse uses for everything in the only room Danse ever had to call his own as he stews in the orders he’s just been given.

No. The vertibird pilot is rubbing her eyes and just putting away her goggles, but she greets him with a spirited “Hail, Paladin,” when he shows up to her and tugs the goggles on right away.

“Sanctuary Hills,” is all he really has the heart to come back with. Just the brief walk from the command deck to the docking bays was enough to wind him up so tightly that the urge to smoke starts consuming him. “Please,” comes as an afterthought, as he tugs himself up into the passenger side and she revs the engines.

When Alex finally stumbles into his tent in Sanctuary hills far past 2100, he first digs out the Gwinnett Ale he had stashed in a sack by the nightstand and uncaps it in the light of his Pip-Boy. He’s firmly aware that Danse isn’t there- he finds his eyes traversing to the mattress and finds, after a discerning stare, no form of a human being, nothing.

The ale gives a soft pop of uncapping as he shunts the cap against the edge of the nightstand with a forceful downward motion, and he undresses in the dark, half-drinking, half unbuckling and stripping away armor. He wants to go looking for Danse, he does, but he finds himself chiding that thought, because he doesn’t own him. If Danse wanted to be here, he would. If he’s currently walking as far away from this hellish place of possible with as much as he can carry, well then, he is.

Alex drinks until he doesn’t have to think about anything more than how damn cold it is when he bundles beneath the covers. He takes no pride in how he puts the finished bottle right straight down next to its old neighbor in the accumulating rows beneath the pallet completely by touch and habit.

He remembers something Nora told him a long time ago in college, from one of her books. She’d copy things into little notebooks and carry them around, flip through them if something he said ticked to find what she wanted.

“The universe is unfolding as it should.”

It sounds alien in his own voice, spoken to the steady whirr of generators beyond the walls. But he falls asleep to the thought of it anyway.

 

_ “The universe is unfolding as it should-” _

Alex blinks as he opens his eyes and finds the rush of daylight pouring in through the cracks in the roof. Just a second ago he was- it was Nora speaking, he was home, it wasn’t a bad dream. She was quoting that poem to him like a record on repeat and-

“Desiderata in your sleep, Alex?” Nick’s gears whirr gently as he takes a long drag of his cigarette, seated as he is in the chair by the door. “Quite the spiritual.”

He sits up slowly so the inevitable pain doesn’t hit his temple so hard; it still does. Nick patiently smokes in his corner until Alex cringes from the pain and waits for it to recede enough to say, “The hell, Val?”

The old detective just digs into his front coat pocket for a battered pack of smokes, lighter tucked in between the cigs, and tosses it his way like it could help. Annoyed, Alex lights up anyway and throws it back. “There’s word getting around town,” Nick says, mechanical arm catching perfectly and tucking the smokes away. “Whispers. I thought you should be in the know. I knew your friends don’t exactly know the meaning of ‘subtle’, but this is rather impressive.”

“Liberty Prime, you mean?” he asks. By all rights Prime should be a Brotherhood secret, but building a forty-five foot monstrosity in an airport usually doesn’t go quietly.

“No, I mean that haircut with those glasses,” the detective grumbles. “Yes, I mean Prime. Nuclear warheads, Alex?” Nick doesn’t have to add the  _ Really? _ The annoyance and disappointment in his tone is evident enough. “I said I’d help you find your son. I didn’t say anything about nuking the bastard.”

“My son’s dead,” Alex asserts calmly, taking a stiff drag and watching the cherry burn bright. “As for the Institute, you’d rather they go on as they are? We’re evacuating civilians, you know that?” he levels his gaze with Valentine, squinting in annoyance as he makes out the man’s yellow-glow eyes fixed on him. “Do you really think I’d just go after innocents like that?”

He gives a low, grumbling noise that’s only close to conceding. “I don’t know what to think, pal. That’s the thing. You’re between the tin can and the sky and doing real good for people around here, a bottle, and a bomb. What do you think?”

“If it’s so hard to wrap those gears in your head around, then I’m definitely doing  _ something, _ ” he says with an annoyed grin, shoving off the bed and ignoring the blare of pain that blooms all along his brain as he dresses, perking the cigarette between his lips as he works. Gun holsters, guns, check, rifle and shotgun and glasses and Pip-Boy-

Nick stops him with a cold hand around his wrist as he works the Pip-Boy. “Hey. What’s eating you now?” He tips back, peering up at him past the brim of his hat. “You’re even more in a twist than usual, partner.”

Partner. It’s his soft-spoken, poking detective voice and Alex knows it. “I got new orders. They’re not good, but they’ll insure the Brotherhood does what I need them to do when the time comes.”

He nods, releasing him and sitting back, crossing an arm under the other as he smokes. “You going to tell me what you’re about to do?”

“Right now? I’m going to go find Danse,” he says, patting the strap of his Pip-Boy.

“...Right.” Nick doesn’t sound pleased about being dodged, but he doesn’t look entirely too angry, either. “I heard.”

“Yeah. He’s not… Um.” He clears his throat and glances away from the detective. “Look, I’ll see you later, okay, Val?”

“Do I got a choice?”

He smiles and has the compunction to feel a bit bad. Nick came all this way, after all. Still, he straightens his glasses for what’s surely the brutal light of day, and tears out of the shack to begin walking.

 

In the end he finds Danse on the hills overlooking the town, seated at the edge of the elevator platform to the vault and curled with his hands on his knees. His uniform’s a mess of dirt and frayed edges, and time has mussed his hair into disarray. He doesn’t move or say anything as Alex proceeds to sit down right beside him, frowning as he laces his fingers over his knees and plays his thumbs in a circle around each other. Together, they look over the shantytown of Sanctuary he’s pulled together below.

It seems like forever before Danse speaks. Alex has settled in to the point of silence and the trees when he finally hears, “I was wondering how you felt. When you came up and saw all this.”

Alex doesn’t say he felt close to nothing. He’s still not sure if that particular set of reality will sink in. He feels it close sometimes when he fiddles with his wedding ring or hears a song, like it almost will arrive, curdling and twisting in his chest, and then it’s gone and there’s just anger. He sidles in closer to the man then, taking that as an opening to wrap his arm over Danse’s shoulders and skirt his hands across the soft tufts of his hair.

“I told you you couldn’t possibly understand how I felt to have my entire world taken out from under me, that night,” Danse continues. He inhales, seeming to make an effort to control his breathing. Alex can see he’s been crying from the ragged circles around his eyes, but now they are dry. Dry, just clenched with pain. “I was presumptive, I know, but it still feels as if there’s absolutely no way to come around this. This…” he looks to his hands, turning them to rest his knuckles over his knees. “Inhumanness. This not being Danse.”

“You are Danse,” Alex says, frowning and resting his arm across the man’s chest. “You  _ are  _ someone, and you’re someone I…” his mouth goes dry and he swallows, trailing off until his hand curls to a fist in the soft rubbery cloth of Danse’s uniform and they’re both consumed by the implications. He clears his throat, then, turning to nuzzle his head against the side of Danse’s temple, feeling the heat of his skin and the lightest pulse of blood beneath it. “Where did you go, last night when I got back?”

He seems to contemplate this question. “I just… walked.”

“Did you sleep?”

“I’m not sure.” Danse turns to him then, searching his face. “I’m sorry about all of this. If I made you worry. That wasn’t my... “

“Shh.” He shakes his head. “Don’t. I just want you to be… all right.”

Danse blinks as if this is a strange thing to hear, as if Alex hasn’t been saying this to him since long before any of this disaster happened. “I’ll be fine,” he says, eventually. “I… I owe you greatly.”

Alex shuts his eyes because Danse is doing it again, he’s processing all of this entirely on his own terms and they’re strange and completely outside of his logic, and yet it’s so  _ Danse.  _ “You don’t owe me shit. You were a good CO to me. You made protocol so we would watch each other’s backs no matter what, you talked me through moments of freezing and slowed me down when I was going too fast. When I told Maxson he wasn’t taking away the one thing I’d gotten from this goddamn wasteland, I wasn’t lying. Okay?” he gently shakes the man, reaching up and brushing along the rough unshaved line of Danse’s cheek. “Okay?”

That look again. “That doesn’t change how I feel,” he says. “...As strange as it sounds, Alexander, I… I think I need to stay.”

“Oh.” He exhales, hard. “Good. Good,” he whispers, and pulls him into a kiss that’s so forceful he feels a jolt of regret climb up his back. Apprehension, all up until Danse kisses back, gripping his jacket with both hands and all but falling against him.

With moments like this, he thinks, he yanks out the last bit of life the world has to offer him.

They don’t go further than kissing up there, though with Danse on his back and breathless and Alex fully pressed against him, it’s terribly tempting. They straighten up, quietly, sobered by the sudden onset of dark that brings Alexander remembering he has orders and who knows what thoughts to that pensive mind of Danse’s.

“I got promoted,” he says as they make the walk back down the hill- casually, he hopes, though his throat tugs itself almost closed at the end of the word ‘promoted’.

Danse follows him over the creek. “To Paladin?”

“Yeah,” he says. He knows Danse is looking at him expectantly for any further word from Maxson, and it makes him walk all the faster up toward the fences and overgrown bushes of the settlement.

Any time now, there’ll be a goddamn vertibird in the sky and Danse will have to disappear. Any time now, he’ll be back to being what he really is; the smell of gunfire and the hard push of recoil against his wrists and of course the slickness of blood beneath hi-

“Alex. Soldier.”

He blinks, one hand on the gate and the other clenched at his side. “Sorry.”

Danse’s brows are knitted in worry and he has a hand on his shoulder as they return to their shack. The ardor that seized him for even a moment up there on the hill feels close to nothing now, like a meal when he’s suddenly nauseated.

Nick isn’t there when they return. He shuts the door behind them both, fumbles for a cigarette as Danse turns on the lights. The man stares, like he wanted to kiss him before he went to light up, and Alex holds the stick away as soon as it’s lit and drags him in, hungrily drawing his lips and his tongue across Danse’s mouth and relishing how his skin yields against his. It takes just seconds before Danse has his elbow on the door above Alex’s head and is kissing like he’s starving, and the cigarette goes completely forgotten by his side as he tugs on his clothes.

Danse stops suddenly, easing away just inches and studying him. “We shouldn’t,” he says. “If you were promoted, you must…” he pauses, licking his lips. Alexander can make out how red they are even in a silhouette. “You have orders, don’t you?”

He gives a dark chuckle, a bit surprised, and slips out from under him, going to relight his cigarette. “What gave it away?”

“You had that look to you,” Danse says. “The same one you had in the subways that time. You were thinking about battle.”

He’s surprised he remembers. That was a minor firefight and a long time ago- December- a single freakout he’d not had in company since. He’d cursed a blue streak somewhere between his apologies when the paladin had appeared before him.

Danse barely knew him then, but he’d dropped down to kneel in front of him, grabbed him by the shoulders and reminded him where he was, who he was. He’d counted, he’d repeated the directive of the mission and he’d painstakingly dragged every piece of Alexander back together into a human being.

Danse had so much goddamn faith in him.

“Alexander.” Danse doesn’t move from where he was at the door, just worries. There’s a chill in the air that stayed in this room, in the shade, and it’s curling all around Alex in a way that makes him feel like he needs a half-dose of  _ something.  _ “I… I want to help.”

When he rests his palm neatly where his brow meets the bridge of his nose, when he closes his eyes and feels that reassuring pressure, he thinks,  _ He won’t hate me. _

_ That’s the worst thing. _

_ He won’t hate me. _

He doesn’t say anything.

 

He can’t stop fixating on how it feels to be in his power armor.

It’s as he thought; constricting in all the wrong places and almost loose in the chest and arms, cramping his legs in the sweat-soaked space and the whirring and hissing of the machinery receding only when the vertibird fires up, deafening. The knight at his side gives him a thumbs up, which he nods to briefly before stepping back into his receptacle, turning the rifle over in his hands, checking routine details.

The Commonwealth drifts below, enveloped in streaks of black-blue interspersed with fog licking at the buildings and the starlight fires lit from their roofs. The knight by his side makes some kind of comment about what the lives must be like down there; Alexander thinks she genuinely does not know how they live.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tells himself it’s not the time to nurse a resentful thought. Maxson gave a speech to this team, this fine, hand-picked team of soldiers he can trust to be by his side and save his life if need be. Alexander must trust them. He must ride the soft thrum of the Buffout in his veins to the very end of this.

He counts every painful second it takes to descend over Old North Church, the statue glistening in the humid night under vertibird light. He pauses; they are watching him. The knight, the pilot, the man at the minigun, wide-eyed and receptive and ready. He flexes the painful, cramped fit of the suit; it flexes back again him, too-hot and entirely unwelcoming.

This is the beginning. “Ad victoriam, soldiers,” he says, because that’s what Maxson would have wanted, and what Danse would have said. And he tugs to the door of the vertibird and leaps.

 

There’s always something macabre and exhilarating about airdrops in armor: after all, you’re hurtling towards the ground and accelerating, and the entire time you’re flipping Death a pleasant middle finger because now, you’re in 300 pounds of armor, you’re strapped to the teeth with ammunition and grenades, and for half a second you can feel like you’re fucking God.

And then the half second is over and you hit.

The shock absorbers of the suit send him feeling like a ragdoll in a tank, registering vague nausea as the earth gives a resounding groan all around him, bricks cracking and displacing in the epicenter of his impact.

The knights follow, a bleating earthen tempo of metal crashing into brick; and if that isn’t a warning for them down there, Alexander thinks with a dull sting of hope, he doesn’t know what is.

They’re yelling victory chants over their comms. He charges before any of them are even done recovering from the land- they just keep landing, the ground keeps shuddering and displaced dust keeps shaking itself free of the church as he flicks off the safety of his gun and walks.

His headlamp finds him staring in the wide brown eyes of a woman in a button-up shirt with one hand aiming and the other on a grenade. He did not meet her before. She starts, like she was hoping against hope that this somehow would not happen, and it gives him the split second to fire.

That’s one. He walks. Her blood is almost black in an orange headlamp on the church floor. The knights follow, flooding into the space, and he doesn’t want to think of what the armored stampede must do to that first woman’s body.

His eyes span the church space- the minute flickers of movement, the dance of silhouettes against candlelight that sends his fingers itching.

Two more- one in the pews who ducked his head up at the wrong time, one who took cover at a pillar. He hears more fall, but he must continue.

Shaun’s face flashes in his mind. Not the baby’s- Father’s. Father, clean and safe and healthy somewhere beneath their feet. He wonders if he and his little spies can see this. What he thinks.

If he knows he’s coming for him.

The suit pinches against his very bones, rubbing his jacket into his skin as he drags it forward down the tight spaces of the stairwell. He can hear his own breath and realizes how staggered he is by the walk, the bad calibration, the narrowness of the space.

_ Keep going, god fucking damn it. _

They take cover at each pocket of the walls in the catacombs. Of course they do. He hears the hollow, almost rhythmic pinging of the bullets against his armor, maybe even registers a hard pang bloom across his body when one agent make a particularly good shot at his solar plexus, then aims.

One, one two, three. He takes a moment to watch them fall, a little stunned. They must not have taken this position expecting to live long. That’s five. That’s not a big number, is it?

It’s a small number, but people?

He walks. They’ve shut the doors. Alexander shuts his eyes and jams the password in with ferocious haste; RAILROAD; the knights are coming. He can hear them behind him, the constant rattling of gunfire littering his hearing in between the protesting, rusty combination door.

He gives a low, dark laugh in spite of himself when the it gives, rattling open with the low growls of a massive stone clearing away.

It’s Glory that he recognizes first when there’s barely a crack of a hallway made- standing in the center of the platform in the blazing orange gaslight with the minigun swung off her hip. Through the crack he can already hear the whir of the minigun spinning ready.

If she yells at him- and he thinks she does- he can’t hear it over the clouds of dust and the roar of bullets burying themselves in the wall to his left.

Alexander drops the rifle and goes for a grenade. He doesn’t think; this procedure is in his bones. The grenade sings a high tone of metal as he pulls the pin and, dodging around the corner, thrusts it hard and high into the air.

A bullet crashes against his right arm armor and the HUD indicates a loss of calibrators. He takes cover, hissing and beating the loose, sparking cords back into the armor. And he shuts his eyes and waits.

The blast shakes the basement so hard he worries for a moment that he’ll bury them all then and there. His ears feel the ringing like a persistent pitch and the clouds of dust kick up an orange and black hue that floods the halls, the doorway, the room beyond. The light that was above Glory is now broken and flickering with maddening speed.

Six. He proceeds. His mouth is completely dry and scratches him all along his throat when he swallows, hefting the gun and crossing the space where Glory used to be. If anything crunches beneath the power armor, Alexander does not attempt to pay mind.

There is yelling from beyond the hall beyond. He walks. It wouldn’t be the first time he didn’t have a plan.

He inhales a sharp breath of hot, disgusting, humid, suffocating power armor air and stands at the opening doorway of the Railroad Headquarters. They fire first, pouring a hail of lead that sends his power armor whining with the damage, his HUD dancing stats downward into orange as he takes aim and disappears, like a switch, into some other part of him.

It’s a part that sees but doesn’t; if it’s Tinker Tom who was holding that gun to his head just now, flanking him with Deacon on the other side, he cannot remember because they ceases to exist as soon as they leave Alex’s field of sight, the blood whipping across the air where he shot Tom and spraying across his armor, the flash of white of Deacon’s shirt disappearing into streaks of red. If it’s Carrington who’s fumbling with his gun a second too slow over that desk- well.

Well.

 

He loses count.

He isn’t sure of anything at all but that the tempo of the bullets has receded. It’s almost just a steady four-four march now, slow and dreadful.

The knights have poured into the room and taken position at each side of him. His suit is groaning; the left arm is dead and sparking and it keeps effort to hold it up.

It’s only then that Alexander stops and does count; who’s moving, who isn’t. It’s been a long time since he so saw many unarmored, unprepared bodies in one place. Straight in front of him, a woman’s blood stains her mattress bright burning red where her brains spilled out from a bullet and she gazes aimlessly to the lazily rotating ceiling fan.

The air is a clatter of knights thumping around like goddamn gorillas. It’s how he doesn’t hear Desdemona at all when she leans out of cover and aims.

The shot is perfect. By all rights, it could have killed him- the glass  _ crks  _ as the crack spreads like a spiderweb across his right side view, a crater of glittering shards in the center of the impact point. He turns in time to see her take cover behind the planning table.

Desdemona is reloading her gun when he approaches, jamming bullets in the chamber and spinning the round with quick, practiced alacrity that brings her swinging her arm with the gun aimed at his visor within a pace away.

He stops, stills. He wonders how much of him she can see.

“Hey,” he says, his voice crackling over the comm. The speaker systems must have caught a short. “Don’t make this ugly, Dez.”

“Shut up or it’s face full of glass for the venerable Paladin,” she hisses, face twisted in a harsh scowl. From where she’s crouched, she seems so small, skin stripped away by age and hunger.

He can feel the knights’ eyes all on them. The room seems terribly still; the loudest thing is the way Desdemona’s chest violently shudders with her breath and the blare of his HUD telling him his armor’s on its last legs.

He takes too long to say something, to shoot, to do anything. Desdemona smiles angrily. “You’re a coward, too, then,” she laughs.

Alexander doesn’t move fast enough when she bows her arm and stares him down, defiantly, barrel jammed into the giving flesh beneath her chin as she fires. The blood sprays and an arc behind her and she crumples, a figure of white on the deep red brick, leaving the chambers echoing with every brutish step the squad takes but nothing else.

He turns. A violent shiver consumes his body from the base of his spine to the ends of his fingertips; he’s lucky the soldiers cannot see.

They are expecting orders. “Sweep the place,” he orders, the comm hissing static. Annoyed, he pops the suit helmet off, the air hissing with depressurizing as he takes on long sucking breath of Railroad air.

It smells as he expected, as he’s always known it to be. Fresh fucking death like piss and iron, earthy tones of gunpowder, displaced mortar and dust. His lungs protest this, scratching up his throat as he proceeds to look for PAM.

He steps over bodies and stops to shake loose ammo free of bags. He avoids those whose names he knows.

 

It doesn’t feel normal, but it feels quiet inside his brain, like he lives only in the sensations he experiences in the too-bright lights and the soft whirr of PAM coming to attention of his presence and his entire body twisting and whining in that now wrecked power armor.

But that’s as close to normal as this sort of thing ever gets.

As he leaves, half-dragging his suit to compliance up the countless stairs and past the bloodied walls amidst cheering men, Alex counts and debates the ethics of rounding numbers if those numbers are bodies of those who were, by all rights, probably the good guys.

It keeps his head busy.

 

It’s 0100 and Maxson is pouring him a drink, politely ignoring the spark that threatens to undo his right leg armor’s entire circuit as he stands before him to debrief. Alexander wonders, as he speaks, if the suit’s shock struts will still hold if he launches himself off the Prydwen portside just to get away from the man right now. How upset Danse will be to see his suit put to this state. Is there blood on it? He’s not sure. He can’t check now. Hours and hours, he remembers, watching Danse pore over rust, clear out mud and blood, refashioning circuits-

Inside, his body can’t stop unconsciously twitching.

Last night, for a very short while, the only reason he really hated Maxson was for calling Danse an  _ it.  _ He stares the man down as they salute the Brotherhood; the glass, outside of his touch, feels like an incorporeal concept even as it provides very corporeal, burning bourbon to the back of his throat.

He contemplates shooting Maxson when the burn is spreading in his belly, a sting protesting the alcohol without a meal. Whether he knows what’s going on in Alex’s brain or not, the man has the goddamn self-righteous levity to provide them both a moment of silence after the toast.

It lasts five seconds. Alex counts. And then Maxson goes for the bottle and they top up to number two and he wants to laugh hysterically because it’s just a pair of monsters drinking in the Prydwen command deck now. And they both look  _ so much _ like people.

It’s 0127 and he’s boarding the vertibird.

It’s 0223 and Alex almost falls into a faceful of concrete when the power armor releases him. The Buffout’s completely worn off. His left arm is almost blood-dead, and sweat has coated every last surface of his skin and percolated him in himself. The spring air is chilly, and Sanctuary is bathed in an eerie still darkness that greets him coolly as he stumbles towards his shack.

“Alexander?”

Shit. Danse stands right at the door of the shack. Danse can see the steaming pile of shit he’s made of his power armor  _ right there. _ He laughs, highly uncomfortable as he strains to hook his gun over his back. “Hi, honey.”

Danse doesn’t say anything more, just launches himself to his side and hooks his arm over his shoulder, dragging him the rest of the distance into shelter and into bed. There’s just an oil lamp on by the bed, there’s a gun half-assembled over the table like Danse had been meditating in its details. “I need a fucking drink,” he rasps. He doesn’t say  _ another _ fucking drink because he knows Danse doesn’t approve.

The frown that tugs on Danse’s lips is so very real and burning with worry, but Alex just levels his stare. “I’m really not fucking kidding. Please, Danse.”

When the man still doesn’t budge, he groans and pushes up off the bed, rifling through the rucksack and finding a sufficiently full bottle of vodka that’ll do just job just fine. With the bourbon already seeping into his system, this’ll be perfect. “You want some?” he asks.

“No,” Danse says, tension in the draw of his shoulders, in his voice.

He shrugs, uncapping the bottle and taking a long swig. It’s cheap and it tastes like ass in his mouth and fights the entire way down, and he shakes it off as he crawls back to bed, stripping away his button up to lay half bare by Danse’s side.

“What happened?”

“You’re not mad I fucked up your suit?” he grins, nursing the bottle against his chest.

“Alexander,” Danse’s voice is low, warning. “I need to know you’re all right.”

“I’m fine.” He takes another drink, desperate, gasping as he finishes and wipes away the residue on his lips. “Hey,” he says, “how old were when you lost track? Of people?”

“Of people?”

“That you’d killed. And don’t fucking say a Gen 3 or a not-feral ghoul wasn’t-” The look on Danse’s face is all Alexander needs to know this talk won’t work. He stops, sobered by the drawn, plain discomfort sketching the man’s features. “I might have made a very bad gamble tonight. No,” he recalls Dez’s body crumbling over the brick floor, the look she’d given him. “I know I did.” He smiles grimly, rolling over on his side and glancing up at him.

Danse frowns, slowly reaches for his hand until it’s clasped, narrowly pressed into his palm. Alexander blinks as the man gently lifts away his hand and brings it to his lips, slowly breathing in, and then kissing each knuckle. It’s chaste, a soft touch he barely feels.

“Danse. Um. What was that?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, softly, as if upset. “I… What you said made me remember it. In all the books I’ve ever read, it’s a sign of… respect, reverence. Look,” he says, turning Alexander’s wrist so he can see the dark blotches of his scars and bruises and freckles in the oil light, “I’ve spent a lot of time among your settlers this last week, Alexander. Your hands built their shelters, saved their families. I never thought I’d see that, anywhere, growing up.”

He blinks. This registers to him as a fact, yes, but it seems like such a shallow thought in comparison to the bodies he stepped over, the bullets he shook free of the pockets of corpses.

“It was always the Brotherhood,” Danse continues. Alex listens, drinking in his words, his voice, how it dips to a low firmness, how Danse seems incapable of saying something without absolutely believing it. “Preserving the old ways, rebuilding civilization as I saw it, vanguards of past glory- and now I find you. A creator.”

Alexander smiles even as his eyes ache and a tremor seizes in his heart and the thought revisits him,  _ He won’t hate you. He won’t hate you. He won’t-  _ “You,” he whispers, wiping his hand across his face as he holds Danse’s all the harder. The man squeezes him until his hand feels like the only warm thing in the world. “You’re so fucking good to me.” He shuts his eyes, the guilt gripping him. “I need another drink, I-”

“No.” He pauses as he recognizes Danse’s grip curl around his other wrist, effectively holding him down and keeping him from moving. “Please. You don’t,” the man says, firmer, “you really don’t, Alexander. Please.” Imploring. He shouldn’t look. He shouldn’t look and he doesn’t want Danse to see him, fresh tears stinging his eyes. “Tell me what happened.”

He laughs, and marvels at the sound of it all, the circumstance.

_ I can’t believe you believe in me. _

It’s after 0200 when Alexander sinks, and this time, it’s Danse’s turn to hold him.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, you can go yell at me in the comments or at that place where I tumble, shout at the void and paint stuff: https://kollapsar.tumblr.com .


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